5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Purchasing Café Furniture

At Café Solutions we’ve been helping cafes and bars all over Brisbane to furnish their interiors for many years. As a leading supplier of café furniture, it’s true when we say have lots of experience within the industry.

Buying café furniture isn’t quite the same as buying furniture for your home. However, some people don’t realise this and as a result make costly mistakes. To help you avoid doing the same, we’re put together a few tips which will take the mystery out of buying furniture for your café or bar.

1.Have a plan

Before even visiting a website to look at café furniture the best advice we can give you is to take your time and plan. In order to make the right choice of furniture you need to know the measurements of the area you’re looking to furnish. Other points to consider are how much money you have to spend, the durability of the furniture you’re choosing, what material you want it to be made from, and what style – modern, vintage, traditional etc.

2.Avoid buying too much furniture

Have you even sat inside a café where you’re so close to the table next to you that you’re almost touching elbows and you can hear every word they’re saying? We understand that you’re keen to be able to serve as many customers as possible, but when it’s at the detriment of customers feeling crammed in, then our advice to you is to cut back. Draw out a seating plan on a piece of graph paper, allowing room for customers to pull out their chairs to sit down and for any waiting staff to be able to move freely in between the tables. There should also be a clear path way to the washroom.

3.Measure, and then measure again

Take care when measuring your dining area, and then double check your measurements. There’s nothing worse than ordering furniture only to find that it doesn’t fit in the configuration that you had planned.

Always check out the measurements of any furniture you like and work out if it will fit in your space without being too cramped.

4.What style of furniture to choose?

First of all, you need to consider whether you’re looking for a quick turnaround of customers or whether you’d prefer them to stay for longer. If it’s the former, then choose more upright chairs possibly made from wood or metal which serve the purpose but don’t encourage customers to linger for an hour over one coffee!

If you’d like customers to stay for longer and order extra drinks and food, then think about providing an area for lounging with a newspaper for instance, and furnish it with sofas or tub chairs for added comfort.

Another alternative is to invest in booth seating which could be placed around the perimeter of your dining area with table and chair sets interspersed in the centre. By offering your customers a variety of seating options, you’ve got all your bases covered.

5.Buy commercial furniture

Never ever be tempted to buy residential furniture for your café or bar. Commercial furniture is designed to withstand the rigours of a bustling environment where the furniture is being used on a frequent basis throughout the day. Our AFRDI tested furniture, for instance, is a good choice because it has passed numerous stringent tests and has the AFRDI certificate to prove it.

At Café Solutions we offer a wide choice of café furniture in a variety of styles, sizes, and materials. Currently, we’re running a promotion on timber furniture, so you could even save yourself some money. Why not browse our online store or visit our Brisbane showroom to take a look for yourself?